MADAWASKA, Maine — The Madawaska Select Board plans a special town meeting Thursday to discuss paying $1.15 million to Twin Rivers Paper Co. for tax abatement and associated legal fees.
If voters approve, the town would use a combination of funds from its reserve account and undesignated fund balance.
The decision would resolve a year of disagreement with the mill over an assessing mistake that lowered the mill’s tax bills for three years.
Company officials at the mill, which is Madawaska’s biggest employer, requested the abatement in May, asking the town to lower the mill’s assessed property value by $25.3 million. The town denied the request after hiring a third-party assessor who determined that its calculations were accurate.
Twin Rivers accused the town of swapping its real estate and personal property assessments. The town contested this and said the error instead came from the assessor mistakenly using the mill’s reimbursed value instead of its assessed value for 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Assessed value is a property’s fair market value. Reimbursement value is what Maine pays to municipalities to recoup tax losses on properties that are covered by homestead and other exemptions.
The mill’s property values in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 totaled, respectively, $65 million, $43.7 million, $43.7 million and $41.4 million. If the error had not occurred, those values would have been more consistent at $65 million, $68.2 million, $68.6 million, and $65.1 million.
After catching the error, the town set the mill’s 2024 valuation to what they say it should have been in 2023, which is $65.2 million, or a $23.7 million increase over the previous valuation of $41.4 million.
The mistake had been made for several years to the mill’s advantage, Town Assessor Lewis Cousins said at last year’s meeting. Twin Rivers CEO Tyler Rajeski said then that the hike was a drastic increase at a time when tariffs were threatening to increase the mill’s costs by millions annually.
In the months that followed, the mill escalated its abatement request by filing an appeal of the town’s decision with the state.
Last month, town officials agreed it would be in the town’s best interest to settle the tax abatement request, “as it not only resolves Tax Years 2024 and 2025 but provides certainty as to the assessment value of the property for the next three years,” according to a town statement.
The $1.15 million also includes legal, assessing and expert witness fees. $800,000 will come from a town reserve account and the remaining $350,000 will come from the town’s undesignated fund balance, which currently sits at $4.42 million.
The public meeting and tax abatement vote will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 16, at the Madawaska Middle/High School Library.
